The Era of CX Automation Has Begun: My Key Takeaways from Verint Engage 2025

A Personal Preface

Walking into Verint Engage 2025, I carried decades of battle scars and hard-won wisdom. As a former Chief Customer Officer at global companies, enterprise architect, and consultant who's grinded through countless enterprise deployments, I thought I'd seen everything the CX world had to offer. Eight years ago, I was in the trenches managing one of the first major AI chatbot deployments at a global bank - back when "AI" was more aspiration than reality.

What I experienced at Verint Engage felt intimate - more like a family gathering than a corporate event. The tangible results I once fought tooth and nail to achieve with clients are now happening at scale, with measurable precision that would have seemed impossible just a few years ago.

The highlight was having intimate 1:1 conversation with CTO Rob Scudiere , Head of AI Innovation Raj Balasundaram , and Chief Data Scientist Ian Beaver at the Innovation Pavilion.

The Milestone That Made Me Stop in My Tracks

When CEO Dan Bodner announced that Verint had crossed 50% of its annual recurring revenue coming from AI-powered solutions, I felt a chill of recognition. I remembered those early days when getting even basic automation to work felt like moving mountains.

Our dinner conversation revealed the man behind the strategy. Learning about his journey to the U.S. and hearing him speak fondly about his mother, who lived to 102, painted a picture of someone who thinks in terms of sustained success rather than quarterly wins.

The $2 billion Thoma Bravo investment positions Verint to stay ahead of an increasingly crowded and chaotic landscape.

The Reality That Every CX Leader Needs to Hear

Chief Product Officer Jaime Meritt ’s statistic hit like a punch to the gut: 95% of AI initiatives fail to deliver measurable outcomes. What separates Verint from the wreckage is obsession with measurement from day one.

Built-in value dashboards track what matters most:

• Workforce capacity - Are we freeing up agent time, or creating new busywork?
• Revenue per agent - Are we driving real sales impact, not just efficiency theater?
• Customer satisfaction - Are CSAT and NPS scores genuinely improving?

Customer Success: Where Theory Meets Reality

The customer awards dinner with CX leaders provided masterclass insights into practical AI implementation, reinforcing breakthrough results that CEO Dan Bodner categorized as "STRONGER, FASTER, MEASURABLE outcomes."

STRONGER means outcomes that matter:

• Aetna, a CVS Health Company : $8 BILLION in revenue safeguarded by turning their contact center into a strategic engine analyzing 800,000 customer surveys monthly
• Volaris Airlines : Managing 3x customer volume while cutting costs 70% - achieving what Verint called the "digital transformation triple crown"

FASTER means immediate impact:

• Pilot Flying J : Cut mobile app resolution from 15 minutes to 5 minutes while reducing abandonment to under 3%

MEASURABLE means tracking what drives value:

• British Telecom Global Communications India Limited : 10% revenue increase per agent using AI coaching - now scaling from 100 to 5,000 agents
• New York Life Insurance Company : From 10,000 manual reviews per YEAR to 40,000 automated reviews per MONTH with enhanced compliance and coaching

As Dan put it: "The difference between weak and strong AI outcomes could be tens of millions of dollars. A strong outcome is when you elevate customer experience, increase revenue and reduce costs simultaneously."

What Separates Winners from the 95% That Fail

Three critical differentiators emerged from my conversations:

1. The 90-Day Risk-Free Program lets customers test with actual production data. This is why British Telecom scaled to 5,000 agents - they knew what they were getting.
2. Open Data Philosophy allows customers to export their data at no cost and use it however they want. No vendor lock-in that strangles innovation.
3. Business Value Centric Approach defines specific business objectives and measurable outcomes before any technology discussion begins.

Inside the Engine Room: Conversations with Technical Leaders

Rob Scudiere 's Platform Vision

Rob's "layer cake" architecture includes a multi-cloud abstraction layer that lets developers deploy anywhere without worrying about underlying differences. It also enables Verint to acquire and easily integrate new technology into its stack. i.e. When they acquired a coaching company, they integrated it onto the platform within a quarter.

This open approach meets customers where they are: "Large enterprises are always chasing the holy grail of having one telephonic system. That never happens."

Raj Balasundaram 's AI Philosophy

With his background in "old school AI" before the LLM explosion, Raj brings healthy skepticism to current hype: "LLMs are like a sauce which everybody wants to add, but that's not how it's done at Verint. We have our own patents, our own models, which are purpose-built for specific purposes."

His focus on contact center data makes perfect sense: "Contact center data is immutable - the customer is upset, and that's recorded data. It cannot be altered."

Systematic efficiency improvements include:

• Better transcription: Moving from 80% to 95% accuracy
• Smarter routing: Using AI to understand intent and route immediately
• Real-time agent assistance: Automatically pulling relevant records
• Automated summaries: Cutting post-call work from 2-3 minutes to 4 seconds

Results: customers routinely shrink 7-minute calls to 3 minutes without sacrificing quality.

Ian Beaver's AI-as-a-Service Philosophy

Chief data scientist Ian Beaver's business-first methodology flips typical AI implementation:

1. Define the business problem first - before touching technology
2. Establish measurable KPIs - tailored to each specific problem
3. Determine required data - what do we need to solve this?
4. Select appropriate technology - not the other way around
5. Build focused POCs - with production data and real metrics

Verint’s AI-as-a-service architecture creates compound advantages. Customers integrate once with the data hub and get access to everything through the same APIs their products use.

Innovation That Solves Real Problems

Chief Revenue Officer for Americas Steve Seger announced two new products that address critical pain points:

1. The Exact Forecasting Bot achieving over 90% forecasting accuracy. Customers could see 5-10% accuracy improvements translating to $2-4 million in savings for 1000-agent centers.
2. The Intraday Spike Bot identifies the source of unexpected volume surges and anomalies and presents potential next best actions. For example, if a contact center is seeing a surge in volume, it analyzes root cause of disruptions, perhaps detecting a surge of interest in a marketing offer, , suggests actions such as updating IVR scripts while coaching agents to convert inquiries into sales

Why CX Automation Matters

We've reached a tipping point. The question isn't whether CX automation works. The question is how quickly organizations will act on what's now clearly possible.

The $2 trillion that brands spend annually on CX labor executing manual workflows represents the largest automation opportunity in business today. The organizations that automate these processes will fundamentally change their relationship with customers.

A Personal Reflection on Excellence

Olympic champion Katie Ledecky 's closing keynote on sustained high performance resonated deeply with my own journey. Her insights on balance preventing burnout, setting incremental goals, and maintaining a continuous improvement mindset captured what I've learned about building lasting success in CX:

• Start small, prove value with production pilots
• Measure what matters: workforce capacity, revenue, and satisfaction
• Automate complete workflows, not point solutions
• Leverage existing infrastructure
• Partner for expertise - the 95% failure rate isn't random

The Urgency I Feel

The window for competitive advantage is narrowing rapidly. The winners in CX automation are rethinking how they create value for customers while building stronger, faster, and more measurable operations.

As Jaime Meritt put it: "The question isn't if you need CX automation, it's how long you're willing to wait before you're left behind."

For those of us who've been in the CX trenches, this moment feels different. The future we always knew was possible is finally, measurably, undeniably here.

The question now is: are you ready to seize it?

For CX leaders ready to move beyond the 95% failure rate, I encourage you to explore Verint's 90-day risk-free program. The time for pilot purgatory is over - it's time to prove what's possible.